Submitting Your Web Site to Search Engines
Matt Cutts recently wrote a post regarding junk mail he received soliciting search engine submissions. While the simple fact that they are sending this junk to him is extremely funny, this is a common problem in the SEO world.
Today, most of the major search engines don’t need you to submit your site to them, they can find it on their own- if you have search engine friendly links from other sites on the Web. So to pay an SEO company to do something the search engines do automatically is a little ridiculous. There are however some common misconceptions. I read an article recently in a trade publication for Realtors regarding SEO and it was very informative and mostly accurate, but the article stated a submission to Yahoo cost approx $300. This is not totally correct, a listing in their directory cost about $300, but if your Web site is designed correctly and you have a link program in place, your site should be found by Yahoo naturally and included in their search results without paying to be in their directory. I do recommend that many businesses pay to be listed in the Yahoo directory, because of the qualified traffic the directory can provide, but again it is not required.
While we normally don’t need to submit the Web sites we create to the major search engines, we do monitor the sites to see if they have been indexed or not, and if a site hasn’t been indexed within a reasonable time frame, we will take the steps to submit the site (at no charge to our customers) to the needed search engine.
I have heard of many instances where a business owner was charged hundreds of dollars by a web design company to submit their site to Google. To me this is an unethical business practice since it only takes a few moments to submit your site to Google and there is no charge from Google themselves. The argument can be made that the SEO company is getting paid for their knowledge and ability to perform this function, but I really don’t think it’s worth the hundreds of dollars many business owners have paid.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:38 am
YOu waste $, when you pay an SEO company to submit your sites for search engine inclusion. All you gotta do is keep writing and let the website or blog sit. It’s good to ping every now and then, but you gotta be careful about that too. Just keep typing, so the computers stay putin’….lol
http://www.Drewryonline.net
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:07 am
I totally agree on submitting to search engine, however submitting to Yahoo for $299 is not the same beast. Your website results can appear in Yahoo as the site is discovered, however top rankings go to people who pay. Yahoo is open about this. They claim manually reviewed sites have higher likely hood of being found in search vs. sites who haven’t paid #299 annually. I don’t like this any bit, but the difference in results of clients that pay $299 and those that don’t is tremendous!